Jim Taylor's Columns - 'Soft Edges' and 'Sharp Edges'

I’m not sure exactly when I first encountered vaping. I was leading an editing workshop. I explained the house rules, which included “No Smoking.” One participant pulled out an e-cigarette. “Is this okay?” he asked.

He said he was trying to quit smoking.

After some discussion, the group let him vape. We were wrong.

It took 500 years for western civilization to recognize the risks of tobacco smoking. The hazards of vaping have become all too evident in one decade.

I can accept that the Spanish explorers who brought tobacco from America to Europe had no idea of its harmful effects. They had no ill intentions. Smoking was simply a novelty.

I cannot accept that their successors, the tobacco companies who aggressively marketed cigarettes through the 20thcentury, did not know that their product caused harm. The medical evidence was overwhelming. Smoking made almost every ailment worse, from cancer to heart disease.

Who is the most despicable person you can think of? The kind of person you would least like to spend any time with? The kind of person who makes your skin crawl?

Back in biblical times, you’d probably be thinking of a eunuch.

Eunuchs had three strikes against them.

A eunuch was almost always a slave.

And probably a foreigner captured in battle, a former enemy

And strike three, a eunuch wasn’t a man anymore. He had been castrated. Although castration of an adult male wouldn’t necessarily prevent him getting an erection, he couldn’t perform that most essential function of manhood – fathering children to continue his family line.

Today is Thanksgiving Sunday. It’s also just nine days away from a federal election. One of the things I’m thankful for is that Canada is not mired in the political lunacy in the U.S.

So far, about the only thing the various Canadian parties and candidates have been able to agree about is that the other side has more flaws than they do.

I suspect that if our ballots had a “None of the above” box, we’d elect a non-government with a huge majority, made up of members who didn’t get elected.

In today’s elections, traditional labels don’t work. A conservative is not necessarily a Conservative, let alone a Progressive Conservative. And a Liberal is not necessarily liberal, especially out here in B.C.

I enjoy good discussions. On almost any topic. Although my aging body no longer allows some physical activities I once enjoyed, I haven’t lost my love of a lively discussion. Yet.

Along the way, though, I’ve learned that there are many ways of destroying a discussion -- from saying too much to saying too little.

Still, in my experience, the most pernicious fault is dragging in an external authority. Perhaps a quotation from a famous writer. A statement from a scientist, ripped out of context. A dictionary definition.

Or selected verses from the Bible.

Especially, perhaps, from the Bible. Because the Bible can be used to support almost any stance, from slavery to prostitution, from genocide to a flat earth. The same is probably true for the Qur’an, the Hindu Upanishads, and the Analects of Confucius. They were never written as reasoned arguments for a unified worldview.

No, I don’t need a holiday. No, I don’t particularly deserve a day off. But on Thursday, the managing editor of the newspaper that gets the first lick at my Sharp Edges columns sent an email: “Take this weekend off. I need your space for election coverage.”

I had a column partly complete. Mostly complete. But I wasn’t happy with it. It was about the federal election, of course. More specifically, about the candidates in my local riding. About which, I daresay, no one outside this riding cares a whit.

All I can give you, this weekend, is your own letters about last week’s column, in which I excoriated (there’s another word worth looking up) a leadership conference here in Kelowna that involved two former prime ministers.

It was billed as the biggest, most important, leadership conference ever held in this area -- the Level Up Executive Leadership Conference -- 10 hours with eight great leaders -- yesterday.

If you bought tickets ranging in price up to $1600, plus tax, you got to hear about leadership from two former prime ministers of Canada: Jean Chretien and Stephen Harper.

The term “former” applies to several other speakers too.

Darren Hardy is the former publisher /editor of Success Magazine.

Walter Bond is a former star in the National Basketball Association.

Omar Johnson is the former CEO of Beats by Dre, the premium headphone company.

Lane Merrifield is the former owner of Penguin Club, sold to Disney for $350 million.

I tried to think back to Jean Chretien’s years as prime minister. Only two things spring to mind -- his attempt to strangle a man who objected his policies, and his long-standing feud with Paul Martin that split the Liberal Party and led to its humiliation in the 2011 federal election.

You’ve probably heard someone say, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” They might apply the saying to music, cars, or cooking. Maybe you’ve even said it yourself.

Lately, I’ve been saying it about worship.

I’ve probably had more experience of worship than most lay people. Since I was a child, I’ve attended worship services pretty much every week.

As a journalist writing about religion, I’ve attended worship in Africa, India, and South America – places where I understood not a single word said or sung. I’ve worshipped in big churches and small churches, in affluent churches and struggling churches, in churches with long-term clergy and in churches with no professional leadership at all.

I’ve shared the Eucharist with 5,000 at a World Council of Churches Assembly. And I’ve sat with six strangers on wooden benches in a converted garage where a lay preacher harangued me about hell and the woman next to me sounded as if she might be having an orgasm.

I’ve heard a lot of sermons. Some were brilliant. Others — to quote my friend Ralph Milton — “barely dribbled over the edge of the pulpit before expiring on the floor.”

My granddaughter is black. She’s in Grade 10, in a comfortable, friendly little city with a population of around 40,000 -- almost entirely white.

My granddaughter is discovering racism. She’s the only black person in her class. Some of her classmates -- one boy in particular -- call her “nigger.” They make fun of her. She feels excluded.

She says she desperately wants to move to Vancouver. Or Los Angeles. Or even Atlanta. Where she won’t stand out, be different, where there are more black people and she can blend in.

She doesn’t realize that blending in -- especially in Los Angeles or Atlanta -- might be more hazardous than standing out in Canada. Blending in might mean getting pulled over, interrogated, searched and manhandled, for the crime of being black while driving. She might be denied educational opportunities, or shut out of job opportunities. At worst, she might be a target for a white-supremacist’s bullets.